Once explanation has been internalised to theory, critique encounters a peculiar resistance. It does not provoke rebuttal so much as deflection. The criticism appears to pass straight through the theory without making contact.
This is not because the critiques are ill-formed. On the contrary, many are precise, technically informed, and carefully targeted. They ask, quite reasonably, what a theory explains, how its formal structures relate to phenomena, and what would count as explanatory failure. Yet these questions rarely gain traction.
The reason lies in a subtle but systematic drift in explanatory language.
Key terms — explain, account for, derive, predict, model — begin to slide across one another. What counts as explanation shifts mid-argument. A challenge to explanatory adequacy is answered with an appeal to predictive success. A question about intelligibility is met with a reminder of mathematical consistency. Each move is locally defensible; together they form a moving target.
This linguistic drift functions as a form of rhetorical immunity. Because the criteria of explanation are no longer fixed, critique cannot land. By the time an objection is articulated, the standard it presupposes has already been abandoned.
A familiar exchange illustrates the pattern. A critic asks what a theory tells us about the world. The response emphasises that the theory produces correct predictions. When pressed on how those predictions are to be understood, the discussion shifts to unification or elegance. If intelligibility is requested, it is dismissed as a psychological preference. At no point is the explanatory demand directly addressed.
This immunity is reinforced by a moral overlay. To insist on explanation is framed as a refusal to accept the lessons of modern physics. Critics are portrayed as clinging to intuition, demanding pictures, or seeking comfort where none is available. The explanatory question is recast as a character flaw.
What makes this strategy so effective is that it does not require bad faith. Participants genuinely disagree about what explanation now means. But that disagreement itself has been neutralised, because explanation no longer functions as a shared evaluative standard.
Critique fails, then, not because it is wrong, but because the space in which it could operate has been evacuated. Without a stable cut between theory and phenomenon, there is no external standpoint from which explanatory adequacy could be assessed. Theory judges itself by its own internal successes.
This is why debates about interpretation, realism, or ontology so often feel interminable. The disagreement is not about answers, but about what would even count as an answer. Without that agreement, argument becomes circular and exhaustion sets in.
In the final part of the series, we will step back from critique altogether. Rather than asking how these explanatory pathologies might be fixed, we will ask a different question: what would have to be in place for explanation not to become pathological in the first place?
No comments:
Post a Comment